Home Fires Burning
by RoseFrederick
Summary: Atlantis and Earth established a protocol for communicating information on a regular basis. It worked fine with Atlantis regularly calling back home to Earth, until Earth stopped answering.


**Home Fires Burning**

* * *

A/N: A treat for Darkest Night 2016, for shewhoguards, written to the prompt Stargate Atlantis stops getting messages from Earth because it has been wiped out, and Jeannie is one of the last survivors.

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Things are technically quiet in Stargate Operations, but there's an almost palpable hum of tension among all of the Atlantis personnel gathered there. More people than usual are loitering in the room, including a few who should be working somewhere else right now. Considering the circumstances, however, Elizabeth isn't going to chide them – at least not until the Stargate shuts down again and they all know the outcome of today's attempt to dial back home to Earth.

"Anything?" she asks the technician manning the controls. She'd stopped trying to hide the naked hope and worry in her voice last week. It wasn't like they weren't all feeling the same helpless anxiety, there was no point in pretending they didn't all know something was wrong anymore.

Chuck just shakes his head no and at her direction, shuts the Gate down. If there hasn't been a response yet, there's no point in wasting the limited power of their ZPM keeping the Gate open any longer. She doesn't have to say the words, she just looks around the room pointedly and gradually Atlantis' people disperse back to wherever they're actually supposed to be right now. Within an hour, there's no doubt everyone in the city will know the SGC has failed to respond to their attempts to dial Earth for the fourth week in a row.

It's two more weeks before they finally get a response. People have continued to gather at the scheduled time for the dial out each week, and Elizabeth hasn't said anything to discourage it. So long as Atlantis isn't having her own major crisis, the city can afford to pause for a moment in worry about their distant home. The Ori are a dire threat the SGC has been struggling to find an effective way to fight, and the speculation of what might be happening back on Earth has run rampant. Still, many of Atlantis' personnel are survivors of the SGC's long years of overwhelmingly bad odds and amazing victories against terrifying foes, so there's very little open panic about why Earth has gone quiet. It wouldn't be the first time something weird happened to Earth's Gate to cut off the SGC from the rest of the universe for a while - not by a long shot. However, as the time has stretched on with no word, the mood of the city has gotten more and more agitated and pessimistic. It has not helped that the Daedalus could easily have made a round trip to Atlantis in the ominously silent interval, yet has not appeared on their sensors or sent any communications.

The established protocol they've continued to follow calls for using McKay's compression algorithms to send a quick databurst going both ways to exchange information without draining the ZPM more than necessary. After the long absence of a return message from Earth, however, everyone is expecting the SGC to actually make direct contact when Chuck announces there's an incoming transmission. Instead, he's barely said the words when the Gate shuts down seconds later, and Elizabeth tries to hide how nonplussed she feels. All of them could have used the reassurance of being able to interact with Earth over a live feed.

"It's not a live connection, but it's not the usual files either – it's just one compressed video, ma'am."

Chuck waits for her to tell him how to proceed. The SGC could have plenty of reasons to avoid keeping a longer connection open, say if they are still involved in or just coming down off of a crisis, for one. But something just feels wrong about this to her. Elizabeth weighs for a moment the benefits of allowing everyone in the control room to see the video against trying to do some damage control and playing it alone in her office first. Ultimately, with six weeks of no contact, there's already too much speculation and little point in hiding it whether the news is good or bad. So with still mounting unease, Elizabeth gives him the go ahead to play the file on the view screen for everyone present to see.

As the video begins to play, Elizabeth immediately recognizes Rodney's sister, Jeannie Miller. Although if the woman's visit to Atlantis hadn't happened so recently, she isn't sure she'd have been able to identify Jeannie so easily. The time between then and now has wrought a great deal of worrisome changes on her. The well-groomed and cheerful young mother Elizabeth remembers is clearly exhausted and looks visibly ill. Even in the low illumination of the emergency lamp on the desk beside her, the tone of her skin is a sickly pale and her eyes are rimmed in red and underscored with dark circles. The grime on her clothes and unkempt hair only add to the general air of desperation and defeat. If she didn't know better, Elizabeth would assume the other woman had aged at least a decade in the past few months.

The knot of trepidation in Elizabeth's guts wrenches itself that much tighter. It could not be clearer that something truly horrible has happened back on Earth. All that remains to be seen is just how bad it really is. Part of her wants to stop the video and put off hearing it and letting the rest of Atlantis know, but it's already far too late for that now.

Jeannie fills most of the camera frame, but there is just enough visible of her surroundings to lend additional unsettling clues as to the wrongness of the situation. Jeannie's seated form is illuminated by a portable lantern sitting on her right, but she is clearly in the SGC's control room. As the hub of Gate operations, it should be as busy as Atlantis' own. Yet the audio is dead silent and no one but Jeannie is visible in the frame. Behind her, some of the machines that maintain power to the Gate and its attendant systems are visible but ominously dark.

On the screen, Jeannie's tired eyes stare directly into the camera's lens and she begins to speak in a hoarse and halting voice. "I don't really know how to start, how to really say this. So I'm just going to - for all intents and purposes, Earth is gone. You can't come back here."

There are gasps of horror and disbelief all around her, and Elizabeth isn't entirely sure whether or not she makes one of her own in that moment of helpless horror. It can't be true, but it has to be true. She doesn't know what's happened, but she knows the woman on the screen in front of her would never say such words without good reason.

Jeannie takes a long moment to pause, visibly breathing deeply. It's clear she's struggling to hold herself back from being overwhelmed with emotion.

"Obviously I don't mean literally in the sense that it's not here anymore," she bites her lip and stops for a minute. "I mean, we just -" She shakes her head a little, staring off into the empty black space beside her as if she's reliving some unpleasant memory before refocusing on the camera.

"We don't even know who started it. Three weeks ago we woke up to the news they'd bombed New York and Los Angeles. Nuclear bombs. It was bad, but those were just the first cities. London, Sydney, Moscow, Paris, and Rio all went the same week. I'm not sure if or when the bombings ever completely stopped since there's no one reporting the news anymore. It didn't take long for things to descend into chaos. Panic, riots, people trying to flee with nowhere to go – I had a – I was presenting a paper of all the stupid - Kaleb and Madison were in downtown Vancouver, when," she stops and brushes at her watering eyes. Elizabeth's hand raises almost involuntarily to cover her mouth and stop the exclamation that wants to come out. For both the greater tragedy of the world and the smaller one of Jeannie's written harshly across the broken expression on her face. She thinks about her fiancé and her own mother and all the relatives of the expedition members here, who thought their families back home were the ones that were safe.

On the screen, Jeannie gathers herself together again. "I don't know what happened to the SGC. I know Mer had us put on the list for the Alpha Site evacuations, but we never got a call while the phones were still working." Her hands move down out of frame again and she takes another deep breath. Her next words come out more steadily, but almost robotically, as if disconnecting from what she's saying is the only way she'll get through the rest of her message.

"My family was gone and Mer was the only one left. So I did what I had to do to get here to the SGC. It was locked down. There were a few personnel from the program topside who hadn't heard from the mountain and we managed to break our way in together. It was empty. There's no physical damage to anything, and nobody noticed anything missing, except all the computers were wiped clean. Obviously the Stargate's still here. Until we found the base abandoned, I thought this was something we did to ourselves, but now? I just don't know."

"SG-2's leader ended up in charge, Major Griff. His first thought was to send someone out to see if they could get help from our allies or see if anyone had made it to the Alpha Site. The SGC had shielded their equipment, but the rest of the power infrastructure didn't withstand the EMP aftereffects of all the blasts, so we only had enough power to dial out a couple of times. There's not enough power here now to run –" she blinks and physically shakes her head. "But it doesn't matter."

"None of them came back from off-world, and I was trying to figure out what else I could do when I got your databurst two weeks ago. I knew you'd call back and I had to find a way to warn you to stay in Pegasus."

"There's nothing you can do. The radiation - it's bad, and even before the news reports went dark it was already almost everywhere. The aerosols in the atmosphere are already causing more extreme weather than any models ever predicted according to one of the scientists who had access to a dedicated weather satellite - all of us here, we're on borrowed time. Even if the extreme weather disturbances and resultant famine don't kill everyone, the fighting over resources, the lack of food and clean water? I'm not a biologist or an ecologist but I can do the math. Even our most conservative calculations have no significant survival rate for anybody after a year or two, if any of us last that long. Some of the areas I traveled through to get here -"

She shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut, before continuing on without finishing the previous thought. "I know you'll want to try, but you have to realize there's nothing you can do except survive for us, so that the memory of Earth doesn't die out. I – good luck, Atlantis. Just one last - Mer, I – I'm glad we got a chance to reconnect, and," she stops and gives a sad little laugh, "and not just because you bought me a car. I wish I'd gotten the chance to make you eat Tofurky at Christmas. I wish – a lot of things. I'm not happy or okay, but knowing that you're out there, that's better than nothing. That's - " she stops herself and finally adds in a firmer voice, "Goodbye, Mer. Goodbye, Atlantis." She stares solemnly into the screen for a long moment before reaching forward to the console in front of her to end the recording.

It's less than half an hour later when the Gate activates again, but this time it's an incoming signal. Sheppard's team is due back from their trading mission to try and acquire some produce from a people Teyla's known for years. She had suggested they might be open to a longer-term trade arrangement for some medical supplies, and preliminary negotiations had been promising. As their IDC comes through and the team themselves step back through the Gate, the four of them are all smiles.

"We've got ourselves a trading partner," John Sheppard tells the room. When there's no response, he glances around and asks, "Hey, guys, what's with the long faces? I mean, I don't expect a parade here, but trouble-free mission, new foodstuffs on the way? Where's the bad?"

"Yeah, you all look like somebody died," Rodney chimes in. When someone behind Elizabeth in the control room hitches in a sob, his face falls. He's not the only one, the whole team has now caught the mood of the room. Rodney, however, is the only one willing to ask, in a series of questions that comes spilling out in an increasingly agitated tone. "Oh, God, _did_ somebody die? Are _we_ gonna die? Are the wraith coming? Did Zelenka break the city while I was gone? C'mon, don't leave me in suspense! Last time one of the idiots tried to hide a mistake and made everything ten times worse I nearly broke out in hives and that wasn't fun for anybody."

"Rodney," Elizabeth begins, but the words lodge in her throat. All her years of training in saying the right thing can't give her a place to begin to tell them what's happened. She'll have to, though. Just like she'll have to find the words to provide comfort for a whole city that's already devastated by the unofficial rumors of the news. Atlantis is truly on her own now, more than ever before.


End file.
